In this way did all citizens of Broken eventually become the warrior queen’s enemies, to be attacked and killed; and thus did she, in turn, become one of the most terrible of the many legends concerning Davon Wood with which those same citizens unnerved one another and attempted to curb any wayward behavior on the part of their children.
Yet on that night, she had approached the site of the old man’s mutilation carefully, and therefore too late to take the lives of the latest band of priests, attendants, and soldiers who had come to the edge of Davon Wood from the mountain. Why? It did not seem to the old man that she was motivated by fear, but rather by some larger purpose: what, then? To finish his suffering for him? Could she truly display such sympathy? He did not doubt it was possible: it was of a piece with his studies of all creatures to know that even inhabitants of the Wood could be moved by such sentiments. And his theory was confirmed yet again as she drew closer, and the old man detected with certainty the full complexity of her aspect: as she studied his mutilated half-legs, dangling awkwardly in the gap between the two trees from which he remained painfully suspended, her expression lost much of the vengefulness with which she had watched the retreating ritual party, and she eyed the old man instead with something very like compassionate curiosity. She detected something unusual in him, he could plainly see that much; and she heard, as well, something noteworthy in the forlorn, agonized sounds that continued to emerge weakly from deep within him.
The old man could not, at that moment, bend his mind to further speculation about her motives; he could only hope that she would end his suffering. That torment was rapidly mounting, in proportion to the steady decline of the effect of such powerful drugs as his acolytes had managed to place inside his cell in the dungeons of the Merchants’ Hall, prior to his being taken to the edge of the Wood. In the one loaf of coarse bread apportioned to the condemned by the dictates of the Halap-stahla, those brave, loyal adherents had concealed half a dozen small, compressed balls of highly potent drugs derived from both unusually pure opium and the resin of Cannabis indica; but the old man had only consumed two doses, while hiding the others on his person, along with other crucial items: long cotton strips that could later serve as bandages were wrapped tight by the old man to hide medical needles and cotton thread soaked in spirits and oil, a ring bearing his private seal, and finally, the remaining doses of his medication, all against the slender possibility that he might survive the ordeal with the help of his acolytes. In the event that they were unable to secure more drugs before coming to his aid, he would need the remaining doses to tolerate his removal from the ritual site, as well as to endure the closure of his wounds with the needles and thread, a necessary means of preventing further bleeding during his no doubt hasty escape. (Later, of course, he would reopen the wounds, allowing all pus to drain from them as they healed, assisted by cleaning and treatment with honey, strong spirits, and the juices of whatever wild fruits he could find.)
This innocent little bundle he folded inside a longer cotton sheet, which could be strapped around his groin to serve as an undergarment, keeping his secret supplies safely tucked behind his scrotum where no priest would be anxious to search. Yet, despite these preparations, the deliverance that he had hoped might appear did not; or, rather, it did not take the form he had expected. Before his faithful students could effect the old man’s liberation, the silent, thoroughly wild, but still wise and regal queen had emerged from the Wood; instead of delivering the dauthu-bleith that the old man thought inevitable, however, she had extended her unusually long and supple body, like some feral child, so that she could bite through the tightly knitted thongs that bound the prisoner. In her subsequent gentle actions, the old man had indeed been able to detect compassion; and when he took the time to consume one dose of his medicines and then, after the drugs had taken effect, to meticulously stitch up his wounds, she exhibited great patience, as well. Only when he was ready had she helped him onto her back, and carried him to the cave in the mountains that had been her home long before it became his.
Yet why had she done it? the old man had wondered, all the years since that day—for on this as almost all subjects, she remained mute: the silence of those whose hearts have been rent almost past repair, and whose souls have thereby lost their voices. The old man had eventually formed notions about her reasons, and these had grown more detailed and accurate, during their time together; but whatever her past, the old man had never doubted that the agonies of flesh and spirit that had been inflicted on him when he had been cast out of the city of Broken would have utterly consumed him—would have driven him, eventually, to himself finish the job that the axe-wielding priests of Kafra had started—if his years of exile had not been graced by her sublime example.
But they had been so graced: she had not only rescued and nursed him, but taught him, as well—taught him the ways of survival in the Wood, both physical and spiritual. And perhaps the greatest miracle of their long forest idyll had been that her every lesson had continued to be embodied in example: brave, silent, instructive example. No member of any of the academies or museums in which the old man had studied and taught throughout the known world and beyond—great talkers, all—would ever have believed it possible; indeed, they would have called it sorcery, as the learned classes and the holy men of Broken had branded so much of the old man’s work. But if sorcery it was, he had long since concluded, then the moralizing of priests and the investigations of philosophers since the beginning of time had been incorrect; indeed, the entire development of human ethics had been absolutely wrong-headed, and so-called sorcery was, in fact, the most profound good that any creature could embody …
Yet we ought not think that the old man did not experience his own doubts, concerning both his sanity and the circumstances of his survival, during the first few of his ten years with the warrior queen; but the proofs and the reality of her care and her tutelage had quickly become so constant that such doubts, even had they persisted, would also have been speedily rendered moot. In the event, they had not persisted; still essentially a creature of adventurous curiosity, the old man had quickly taken all of her lessons and proofs to heart, learning their thousand vital details fairly quickly (especially given the many and considerable factors that could reasonably have been expected, in such a place as Davon Wood, to slow a legless and aging man’s progress), but above all paying heed to that initial quality he had seen in her: the bravery with which she tended to the business of her own life, as well as to the needs of his, while always plainly bearing a hurt that never healed, a tragedy that not only underlay the imperfectly mended wound in her right thigh (which caused a slight, imperfectly disguised limp when she walked, though never when she ran), but that kept the deeper wound to her spirit open and apparent. Even at its mildest, the old man could detect this inner pain tugging at the corners of her watchful eyes, and occasionally causing her shoulders to slacken. Slacken—but never submit. She labored through her grief to meet her new life’s demands, their new life’s demands, knowing (and, as always, demonstrating to the old man) that while some suffering could be instructive, a surfeit of heartsickness could kill; that such excess was far from the most profound manner in which to honor either the souls of the belovèd dead or the memory of a life of wisdom destroyed by ignorance and spite; and that, even when apportioned its proper place, such sorrow, such repudiation of the world and one’s fellow creatures in it, was a thing not to be superficially indulged, as the old man had seen so many poets play at doing, but was one to be respected, and, finally, transcended …
Within and Without the Cave
SUCH TRANSCENDENCE FILLED the pair’s life together, as the years grew to many; and as they so grew, the old man determined to ever more assiduously embody the skills of brave survival and defiant achievement that he saw her practice. It was a regimen that, for her, was not simply a testament to the depth of her injuries and her loss, but that kept the spirits of those treasures that she had lost—those four spirite
d and precious children, murdered or taken as they were bursting from childhood into the first full, daring flushes of youth—alive in her mind. And without the spark of those exquisitely painful memories, the old man came to see, she would not only have quite likely left him to die, on that evening of the Halap-stahla, but would probably have laid herself down to quietly await death on the forest floor.
As a result of all this patient study, the old man came eventually to know of what the warrior queen dreamed, when her own sleep turned restless: her mind re-created, he was certain, her family’s battle with the deathly party of powerful horsemen from Broken. She did so, not as a means of further tormenting herself, but out of the plaintive hope of a different result to that day; and yet, as was evident in the spasms of her legs, she failed each time to achieve that happier outcome. Seeing as much, the old man began, with care, to comfort her as she did him: with soothing sounds and innocent caresses, balm-like contact that was a reminder both of lost joy and of the fact that joy need not be utterly lost, so long as they both lived to dream and to remember.
Among the several effects that this mutual (to say nothing of magnificent) defiance and embrace of tragedy had on the old man, one was preeminent: he set himself, mind and body, to rebuild what he could of his own life and work, both to prove worthy of her greatness of heart and to make her life, if not happier, at least easier; and he started, as soon as his legs had healed sufficiently for simple movements, by improving their primitive dwelling. While she was in the Wood securing their food, he dragged his mutilated body, with supreme endurance, about the rocky, half-lit sanctuary, creating first fire, and then, in the fire, tools: tools wrought from the iron that ran in thick veins through cave and that, more accessibly, bled from the loose rocks that fell from the mountain ledges. With these tools he could fabricate for himself a new way to walk, as well as carve into the cave’s stone ledges more comfortable nooks on which they both could sleep, once those surfaces had been lined with Earth and softened with goose down that the old man stuffed into wide sacks fashioned from animal hides. He even built a crude, protective door for the mouth of the cave, one that kept the curious as well as the threatening out, while keeping in the heat of that first fire: a fire that became perpetual, fed by the stacks of dead limbs that were every night snapped from the trees along the ridgeline by the infamous mountaintop winds.
Basking nightly in the warmth of that first fire, he thought he saw his companion allow something akin to a smile to enter her features: a relaxation of the mouth that, while not necessarily an expression of joy, was nonetheless one of contentment—contentment that, if momentary and even superficial, was a precious commodity for two such wounded bodies and souls, in so merciless a wilderness as Davon Wood. But when sleep came, that smile vanished, and the torment returned. Ever mindful of this ongoing fitfulness, the old man developed an increasingly accurate conception of her mind’s activity; and as he did, he began to wonder if he might not yet find some way to heal the essential torment of her life.
He began to observe her as often as he was able, and spent long periods of time sketching, on parchment fashioned from the skins of her kills, the expressions that filled her dreaming features, when those terrible visions of battle and murder passed through her slumbering mind; and he did so skillfully, for he had once been an accomplished illustrator of anatomical treatises. Soon, by way of these attempts to understand her dream state, he unexpectedly came to recognize an entirely different aspect that quietly filled her face when she awoke and, without moving her body, lifted the lids of her eyes: her bright, alert eyes, which were of a green like to the bright shade of spring’s earliest flora. This expression, he soon understood, was not simply bitter disappointment at the reassertion of her heartsick reality; no, in addition, her face at such moments was a countenance of guilt.
The old man was reasonably sure whence such guilt emanated, for studying the moods and minds, along with the dreams, of royalty had long been a preoccupation of his. And he could state with confidence that what he recognized in her features, at such moments, was her realization—all the more powerful, in its silence—that her own careful instruction in those habits of headlong bravery peculiar to champions of unforgiving battlegrounds (habits that she had learned from her own mother, in her youth, and that she had known, when she bore her own young ones, that they must learn from her), had contributed in no small measure to those children’s deaths. What mother—what father, for that matter—could bear such knowledge without deathly guilt? After only a few moments of this contrition, she who had survived to rule her region of the great forest alone would half-rise to locate the old man, who would quickly pretend to be at some other activity. Reassured by his presence, she would set off again tirelessly: back into Davon Wood, to walk the boundaries of her domain, to hunt, and to protect and provide, the only wakeful activities that seemed to give her any calm, or to temper her shame and her sorrow.
And that dedication had useful results: venison, fowl, and boar—some cooked, some hanging to age, some above the fire and being cured by its smoke, and some absorbing the preservative salts that the old man eventually discovered in deeper caverns—all hung about the cave’s walls, the more so when the regal huntress observed that the old man did not eat the smallest animals that she brought to him, and so stopped hunting them. As to the other needs of diet, the wild plants and trees that grew along the ridgeline outside the cave and in the dales below it, along with the beehives that appeared to fill every hollow tree limb, provided fruit, roots, nuts, berries, and honey more than sufficient for a prudent subsistence; and soon, having mastered the system of supports for walking that he had fabricated for himself, the old man could reach these necessities without aid, and thus free more of her time for hunting and keeping the eternal watch for more riders from Broken …
A nearby feeder stream that fell down the mountainside on its way to the Cat’s Paw provided water, as well as the icy, swift balm that, in their early days together, had been the old man’s speediest relief from pain—although behind this seemingly trivial fact lay another revealing detail of the formation of their bond. It had been she who had originally revealed the merciful stream to him, quite without his cooperation. Alarmed by his howls and screams on the very first of the mornings that she shared her shelter with him, she had done all that she knew how to help; all that she had ever been able to do to ease her own or her children’s physical distress, if they were injured while learning to hunt or while playing with each other in too rough a manner. She went to him, and attempted to caress his wounds; and, when he would not allow this, she tried to pull him upright by his tunic, with surprising tenderness. When this attempt, too, failed, she leaned down to show that she only wished him to throw his trembling arms around her neck, as he had done on the evening before, following the Halap-stahla, so that she could carry him to the beneficial waters. But he, bereft of drugs and frantic in his agony (and still not certain of her ultimate intentions with regard to him, at that early point in their association), had at first become more panicked. Still weak from their journey up the mountain, he at length lost consciousness altogether. She had then lifted him, very tenderly, onto her back (for, in his new, insulted form, he weighed scarcely more than her children had, when young), and carried him down to the stream, where the stitched flesh that had once been his knees began to be soothed.
This ritual was repeated every day for weeks to come, the old man having quickly realized her benevolent intent; and it soon proved so effective that he was able to turn his attention to the task of locating wild ingredients that might be blended into a remedy more powerful than cold water. With his well-practiced eye, he had immediately noted several: mountain hops, the bitter juices of wild fruits, willow bark, flowers and roots that often proved poisonous, in other men’s less educated hands, and those same limitless sources of honey; all these did he gather, in order to produce medicines that would not only reduce pain, but prevent festering and control fever. Even
tually, this humble regimen—in the forms of both poultices and infusions—would bring the old man back to something that resembled, if not his former self, at least a welcome companion, and even a watchman when she slumbered through the daylight hours. This duty would prove especially important, the old man knew, should the rulers of Broken ever discover, not only that he had survived the ordeal of the Halap-stahla, but that he had taken up residence in her cave, and that the two now had what the priests of Kafra would have denounced as an “unholy alliance,” a demoniacal threat whose whole was more dangerous than the sum of its brutalized parts.
Yet there seemed little chance of such discovery: no Broken cartographers, and only a few Bane foragers, had ever reached the remote mountains that were now home to the old man and his protector. His anxiousness relieved by this knowledge, and his wounds in the last stages of closing (his poultices, medicines, and cotton bandages, boiled first in stone and then iron cauldrons, having done their work), the old man soon cleared sufficient ground outside the cave to establish a garden. Here, he cultivated the wild plants and herbs that he gathered along the ridgeline; and the collections of dried medicinal flowers, roots, barks, and leaves that he amassed in the cave, along with the generally pleasing stenches of the various concoctions that he created from them, indicated even to his companion that he was not only returning to something like full health, but was also imagining a new way of life for the pair, the details of which she could not guess at, but the effects of which she soon learned to appreciate fully: